Tag Archives: creativity

Our 1st studio session: 10 things about recording

So as you all know, Saturday April 21st my band Thornfield (joined by Petras on drums) went to the studio. We had no professional recording studio experience and didn’t know exactly what to expect for the day, but we headed in with snacks, wine, tea, coffee, and instruments. And (unfortunately for me) a dry-clean only sweater that I proceeded to completely sweat through about 5 minutes before even arriving. And my outfit totally didn’t work without the sweater, so I couldn’t exactly remove it either (ugh! I hate being trapped by my own clothing selection!). Note for next time: wear layered, easily removable, non-dry-clean-only items.

I just wanted to toss a few things out there before we head into our second (and possibly final? possibly not?) session at the studio this coming Saturday. What was it like? What the heck did we do? Who, what, why, where, when?

Well, our band headed into Handwritten Recording at 12:15pm to tune up, warm up, and set up, with a start time of 1pm with our engineer, Rick. We fiddled with our guitars/piano/drums, sang annoyingly loud scales and vocal swoops by the bathroom, set up our big fat music binders, removed everything from the recording room (instrument cases, coats, purses) that wasn’t necessary, tested mics–and before we knew it, it was time to roll.

And now, onto bullet points–they save me the effort of making connective sentences. Thank you for understanding.

1. I really like our engineer. He was joking with us, super friendly, encouraging while honest, and focused on efficiency. I can’t imagine an experience working with an engineer we didn’t get along with–ack. So if you’re recording, find someone you like! Find someone whose personality meshes with yours, because you’re going to spend some intense hours with this person.

(Also, I found it inspiring that–shameless name-dropping alert–Rick has worked with Sufjan Stevens. He has a letter from Sufjan posted on the back wall–how awesome is that.)

2. We did all “basic tracks” for this first session. In other words: guitars, drums, piano. All the voice stuff and extras (cello, harmonica, bass, melodica, guitar riffs, egg shaker, tambourine, djembe, vocals, etc.) will come later. The reason: this is a one-room studio, and with everyone playing at once you’re bound to get “bleed” when you play multiple instruments simultaneously–sounds from the piano leaking into the guitar mic, the drum leaking into the piano mic, etc. So we wanted to save anything fiddly (like vocals, which we’re bound to be very picky about) or non-essential extras for an overdub track during the second recording session.

Also, on some songs we multi-task–and Petras can’t play the drums and the bass at the same time, for example. So this necessitates an overdub anyway. Though if he could just figure out how to pull that off . . .

Still confused on why we didn’t belt it out at the same time? Well, if we had tried to do vocals during the basic track part, not only would there be possibly unpleasant bleed into the vocal mic (which allows for less manipulation on the back end), but if someone isn’t pleased with how they sang that one silly word on the second chorus, the whole band would have to play the whole darn song again, from the top. Saving the vocals means that once we’re singing, there’s less pressure to get a perfect take the whole way through, and if we sing a couple takes and like different chunks of each, we can more easily pick sections we liked and ‘punch in’ other sections from another take.

This sounds really confusing, doesn’t it?

Hmmmm.

Anyway!

3. So the thing you’ve probably gathered about basic tracking: if you mess up, everyone starts again. I was afraid the pressure for this would completely wig me out and cause my fingers to become miserably wobbly and useless on the guitar–but it didn’t! Turns out I am MUCH less nervous in a studio setting than I am live. Go figure.

4. I learned a new term–‘scratch vocals.’ The gist is, if you’re recording a basic track and no one is singing, it’s very likely that people will get lost and confused. You really need that voice singing along to indicate to everyone where they heck you are in the song–like Carrie is doing here:

So for every song, someone sat out (I did this an awful lot), hung out by the mixer, and sang into a mic which played into everyone’s headphones.

5. Fig newtons can do wonders for restoring ones’ energies.

6. It’s easier to get it done all at once. Our end time was technically 6pm, but Rick suggested that we stay longer to get in the last 3 songs. Basically, it was better to just get it done while we had the set up already configured than to set it all up again in that same way the next time.

7. Getting in the groove takes time–but no panic needed! We started our session with the basic track for “Trust Me to Stay.” This is one of our oldest songs, and probably the song which we have performed the most. I felt confident that we could get two clean takes back to back (yes, our goal was to nail 2 clean takes of everything). HOWEVER–surprise surprise, it took us close to an hour to get this dang track right. An hour. At this point we were tempted to freak out, because if it took us an hour to get every song right, 19 songs (enough for 1 album + 1 EP) were bound to take us . . . well, twice our budgeted studio hours just for basic tracking. BUT we didn’t lose it (thank God), and everything seemed to go waaay fast from there on out. We got clean takes of the second song (Dinosaur) almost right off the bat (go Eric and Peter!), and so forth. Once we got into our groove, we were just spewing out clean takes right and left. It was gratifying, energizing, and Rick actually couldn’t believe it. =)

8. I suspect the 2nd session will go more slowly. I just have this feeling. We have a lot of extras to add. I suspect a 3rd session might have to happen . . . but we’ll see. Either way, I’m not sweating it.

9. Fast. It happens fast–and has to. If someone messes up irreparably and stops the group, you wait 5 seconds, count everyone in, and start again asap. Losing minutes between takes could be so easy–but we all kept each other on task. From the moment we started at 1 until we walked out after 7, it was practically non-stop. Except for the time it took to chew a Fig Newton . . . or three.

This is my justification for the ridiculously few pictures. I thought I’d have all this time to be snapping artistic shots of everyone right and left, but it turns out that there just wasn’t time to pick up the camera, take a picture, and set it down again. I’ll try harder during our second session.

10. I loved it. I love my fellow musicians, I love making music with them, I love seeing and hearing us succeed in this venture that seemed so intimidating, I love the crazy energy that comes even when exhaustion is shooting through your brain. Kind of like the surge of caffeine during an all-night cross-country drive. Your brain is mush, but somehow your body just keeps going. And it feels . . . good. Like a drug.

To all of you who said a prayer on our behalf–thank you! We were truly blessed during this first session, and I can’t wait for session #2!! (keep praying!)

Thornfield CD on the way!

Hi guys!

So you may have noticed that it’s been a looooong time since I’ve talked about anything music or Thornfield related. In fact, probably a good number of you are like Thornwhaaaat??

Well, to catch some of you up, Thornfield is the band I’m in with my friends Eric and Carrie. Here are Eric and Carrie, 2 of my most favorite people in Chi-town.

Our style is folksy/singer-songwriter, a little jazzy, a little bluesy, a little showsy . . . well, I guess it’s a bit of a mish-mash. But a mish-mash that I absolutely LOVE. And who needs labels anyway? We make music that comes from our hearts. End of story.

Anyway, the last time we played a gig was in December at Kevin and Katina’s wedding.

It was lots of fun . . . which reminds me that I never shared the rest of the pics from Kevin and Katina’s wedding! Whoops.

Then Christmas and New Years happened, and, well . . . I guess we’ve been taking it easy and recovering from our musically busy fall and holiday season. But behind the scenes, we’ve been getting ready for our first recording experience.

With certain life changes happening at the end of the summer, we wanted to lay down some tracks and get our music recorded for posterity. Then, we’ll count on this album to keep the memory of Thornfield alive until we can come back together again and make (and record) more music.

So just to be clear–Thornfield is in no way, shape or form dissolving–it’s just a hitting a rather large pause button come this fall. At least let me believe that.

And I do. I do believe.

Anyway, our first mission was to decide if we were going to wing the recording experience with random equipment and the help of friends, or actually pay for studio time. We decided on the latter option after much thought. The next leg involved finding a studio. After nixing the expensive options, we found a little place called Handwritten Recording. And what do you know–it’s right here on Belmont Avenue, and I pass it every single day on my way to work. And the crazy thing? I’ve never noticed it. I wonder how I would have felt if, 2 1/2 years ago when I started my job, someone had said “Hey, look at that little recording studio at Belmont and Southport, kind of hidden behind that one tree. Well in a couple years you’ll actually be in a band, you’ll have written a bunch of songs, and you guys will be recording your first album.”

I think my mind would have been blown.

We met with the owner of the studio (also the engineer), Rick. We loved his enthusiasm and openness. We also loved his price. We asked a crapload of questions. And then we signed ourselves up! Our first session in the studio will be this Saturday from 1-6pm. In that nice little 5 hour chunk we hope to lay down a ton of basic tracks.

Of course, this should go pretty quickly since we don’t plan on making any mistakes.

Yup.

(snork snork)

Our friends Petras, Jon, and Graham will be joining us to lay down tracks for drums, bass, cello and harmonica (Graham is a genius harmonica player–wait til’ you hear him go!). We’re so excited, and we couldn’t do this album without their generous help. Especially without drums, it would just be a puny mess (no offense meant to our own wonderful music, in which I have full confidence–we just need that rhythm, baby).

Of course, when our album makes it big and sells 1 million copies, we’ll make sure to give each of these guys a nice sized check to properly thank them for their contributions. Uh-huh. I’m counting on you, people! In fact, let’s make it 2 million in sales while we’re at it.

These pictures are from our big rehearsal the other weekend, which Petras recorded for the benefit of the different participating musicians. It was a blast. It was extremely hard work. It was uber fun. It was exhausting and draining and we needed tons of Brie and crackers and clementines and such to keep ourselves going.

I’ll make sure to take pictures and tell you the full story of our album-recording experience–and please send some prayers upwards on behalf of our little group if it happens to strike you between 1 and 6 this Saturday! We’ll use all the divine intervention we can get.